“If the house can frighten me like this,” she thought, “what wouldn’t it do to Irene?”
Bracing her slim shoulders and mustering all her courage, Judy marched up on the porch and felt for the bell. Finding none, she rapped with her bare knuckles. The sound of her rap sent an echo reverberating through the walls of the still house.
Judy waited. She waited a long time before she dared rap again. The house seemed to be inhabited only by the echo she had heard and the phantom that had vanished from the tower window.
Still nobody answered. Judy tried the door and found it locked. Then she peered through the lower windows and saw at once that the house was empty of furniture.
“Nobody lives here,” she told herself and then she told herself the same thing all over again so that it would surely seem true. “Nobody ever does live in empty houses.”
And yet she had the strangest feeling that she was being watched!
CHAPTER XIX
LIKE A FAIRY TALE
Her nerves taxed to the breaking point, Judy gave up searching for the day and went to the office. Emily Grimshaw was not there but she had left a message: